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The pandemic has largely been in a younger age group and has been more pronounced in a few countries, suggesting country-specific aspects are driving the pattern of disease and death. COVID-19 transmission in Africa has been marked by relatively fewer infections, which have been on the decline over the past months, owing to a variety of socio-ecological factors as well as early and strong public health measures taken by governments across the region.
The WHO defines Community Health Workers (CHWs) as lay people who live in the communities they serve and who function as a critical link between those communities and the primary-healthcare system. In Africa, they provide low-cost interventions for common maternal and pediatric health problems such as pneumonia, diarrhea, undernutrition, malaria, HIV, measles and now COVID-19. They also assist with immunization.
The East and Southern African Commitment has been an essential regional framework to ensure the two key Ministries coordinate their commitment to adolescent sexual and reproductive health and rights more efficiently while including other line Ministries, such as social affairs, gender and youth, as well as young people and civil society organizations, to deliver comprehensive sexuality education in and out of schools.
According to data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has low learning proficiency and the highest rates of education exclusion, with more than 20% of children between 6 and 11, about 33% of those between 12 and 14 and 60% of youth 15 to 18 years old out of school (UIS 2019). The advent of Covid-19 has worsened the state of global education, but the hardest-hit regions will be those with less robust education systems such as sub-Saharan Africa. Robust systems are identified by their high literacy and numeracy rates, which can be used to predict the future human capital of the country.
